Preface
by Saker.White
Summary: This is not a Maximum Ride related story! If you are from DA, welcome! To others from FanFic, feel free to enjoy this story. Reviews would be appreciated. Thanks so much!
1. Chapter 1

Preface – Why the crap can't I die?

I had finally gotten over myself and stopped bashing my head against the hard, rough red bricks and mortar that made up the one wall left standing in the middle of the huge, wasted field. There were weeds everywhere, growing wildly as they climbed the walls and swallowed the sections of the wall as it dwindled slowly down to merely knee-height far to the left, trying doggedly to tangle themselves around my ankles as I fought my way backwards, my forehead throbbing from hours of pounding. I felt like I had been run over a steam-roller over and over and over…but then again, I might as well have. Aside from the huge slash that ran down my left leg where the knife had plunged into my leg and shredded the skin and a small part of the muscle—making me limp, despite my ability to ignore the fire—and the way my head was throbbing fit to explode, on the _inside…_well, even as strong as my stomach was, I knew that I would lose my cookies if I could see the state of my poor little heart.

I'd never had it broken before, since I'd never let anyone in.

And, sure as hell, when I finally did take that chance and let the one person that I thought could _never_ hurt me close to my heart…they had to go and die.

My eyes were still dry—a result of loss of blood from my leg, I supposed. It didn't see possible to lose that much body fluid—as I stared deadly at the red wall in front of me. My left foot was still moving, finishing my last step, when the overgrown weeds finally won and wrapped greedily around my left ankle. I didn't try to get up, just stared at the wall, the last part of me.

The last part of _everything, _really. Of _everyone. _Of humanity in itself; I was just a small part of what "life" actually meant. I was just a girl. Just a sixteen year old girl who had gone through hell, fought with the devil himself, been blistered by the fires until my skin felt like it should melt, and then didn't even manage to save the one person that I _would've_ given my life for.

I was an idiot. No one but an idiot would ever expect to get in and out of hell without being burnt. I was just an idiot that had lost everything. Every single thing that had ever meant even of a fraction to me.

My hands knotted convulsively around the grass at my sides, and I found myself suddenly wishing that the damn weeds really _were _alive, so that they could rip me apart, sticking me a million times with their prickly spines until I died. And finally, finally, my eyes began to fill with tears that spilled over and covered my face, soaking my ratty, shredded shirt as the tears dripped like a broken faucet off the end of my chin.

I lay back, still silent, and closed my eyes.

I was over, in one word, finished.

Because my heart was gone now, gone completely, and no one, not even the strongest—like I had thought that I was for so long—could live without their heart. It wasn't mutilated like I had thought before; now I knew as I slowly began to drift with the waning light into a deep, mute, suffocating darkness. I knew that it was gone.

The sky above me was a silvery grey as it slowly darkened, the sun setting on the day as well as my life, and slowly above me as I watched through misty eyes, dark clouds began to accumulate in a thunderous, roiling, bucking torrent.

And then it began to rain, each drop seeming to change course in the air to head straight for me. It only made sense, and I wasn't resentful at all. After all, if I was going to die in such misery like this, than shouldn't there be rain at my funeral? But I knew there would be no funeral. No one to mourn my passing; it would be as if I had never existed at all. Never loved. Never fought.

My eyes closed with the darkness in my head, and the rain continued around me, the downpour so heavy the noise seemed more like a thousand hoof-beats of a thousand horses. The air was thick with the tangible humidity, making my breathing shallow. I was happy about that. I needed to die _right now. _

I clenched my teeth and held my breath.


	2. Chapter One

Chapter One

_You're the only one I've ever believed in, _

_The answer that could never be found;_

_The moment you decided to let love in._

_And now I'm banging on the door of an angel,_

_The end of fear is where we begin,_

_The moment we decided to let love in. _

The lyrics from the chorus of my one-time favorite song would not stop playing itself in my mind. Talk about having a song stuck in your head—I hadn't even _heard _the bloody thing for _years!_ I'd stopped listening to anything that came even _close _to the subject of love ever since the accident. I'd been a sap back then, believed in every love story. I'd even believed that we were _destined _for someone else! Now, I shook my head at the ridiculous thought as I leaned against the rough tree bark, my eyes sweeping the field of open flowers, not squinting even though the sun was blindingly bright. The wide, thick foliage of the Oak tree that I was standing under snapped that in the bud.

"Yeah," I muttered to myself, not really noticing that I was talking to myself…_again. _"Like there're even enough people left in the world for me to be destined for. He probably got wiped out with the rest of them…." My voice trailed off, small and tired surrounded as it was by the wide open space that swallowed me like a moth to a hurricane.

I shivered involuntarily, berating myself silently. I was slipping. I _never _reminded me of something that terrified me, weakened me.

I had a sickening, crippling fear of moths.

I fell silent as the wind swept up from the north, rushing wildly over the hill at the top of the valley and roiling gently down into a pleasant breeze that barely ruffled the tips of my hair. My eyes closed of their own accord, and I breathed in deeply, enjoying the feel of the cool air filling my lungs. I rested my head against the tree, tilting it back.

If only I could stay like this…forever. I could survive here most comfortably for months before the winter winds really hit, and then I could make myself a nice burrow in the bottom of the tree here—I'd learned how to while reading _My side of the Mountain _so long ago—and be fine until springs gently petals slowly opened. I sighed, eyes opening to the dark green of the leaves above me. This was easily the most peaceful, most clean, most _perfect _place that I'd been since the accident. And maybe even before—I never let myself remember _before, _so I couldn't be sure.

But I could be sure of one thing. Obviously, because it was _me, _that thing was the one thing that I didn't want to think about almost more than my past. And that one thing was that _they _were following me. I almost laughed out loud at how cliché and over used the term was. I'd heard it over and over and over in the books that I had read before, but for once, it was not over-dramatized. At all. The scum of the underworld, the ones that had ruined the world and made it a life-sucking pit of hell were after me.

And everyone else who was still a normal, functioning human being, for that matter.

A small groan from the trees above me reminded me that I wasn't alone, and I sighed, shoving away from the tree. I turned, staring up at the dark foliage.

"Alyssa?" I said a little louder than I liked to—it seemed overly-obnoxious in the peace of the valley—but it was necessary. The little girl that I had picked up at the last town was a ridiculously hard sleeper.

She didn't respond, and as I started to climb the tree to retrieve her, in my mind's eye I saw everything exactly as I had that cold morning, the sky grey above us. I'd been running, my specialty, and had almost tripped over her. She was in an ally—it seems that Chicago has a lot of those—curled up at 

the foot of a metal trashcan that towered over her like it was a smelly sentential, watching over its prisoner. She was so small, tucked up under a blanket, that when the decidedly animal-like yelp alerted me to her presence I was sure that it was a tiny puppy instead of a girl. So I had almost shrieked in surprise when I pulled back the thin, ratty pink blanket with slippers printed onto it and found myself staring into the unnaturally huge, unblinking clear blue eyes of a girl when I had been expecting to see the wagging tail of a puppy.

She had not moved other than to wrap herself tighter into a ball, pulling away from my hands so close to her as if their warmth was more like an open flame than a comfort in the frigid air.

Now I pulled myself up onto the one of the two branches that she was wedged in between, still in her feeble position with a skill that I had acquired a long time ago in my flight from the monsters that hunted me. She was getting a little plumper, but her poor little body didn't really have time to get any of the baby-fat she was supposed to have. It had gone from the bony, brittle body of a malnourished nine year old to the slightly fitter, muscular body of a ten year old. I smiled wryly as I stared down at her face. I supposed that that would probably happen to anyone…it didn't help that she had a sixteen year old that had already been in shape when the accident ruined our world running her as hard as she could go.

My eyes swept her face critically, my natural aversion to mothering set aside as I realized for the ten-millionth time that she was my responsibility. She _had _no one else in the world, other than me.

I frowned. She _really _had bad luck.

Of the hundreds of people that could've tripped over her n that ally, she had to be tripped over by _me, _the one girl who had failed the baby/flour-sack experiment in health class back in the day. I had never had a pet, and was an only child, thankfully. I would've probably killed my siblings if I had. Anyone younger than me normally irked me to _no _end, even when they were one of the only thirteen-thousand people left.

She had changed drastically, but was still the tiny little girl that I had found last year in many ways. Her eyes, for instance, were still painfully large, even closed. When they were open, they now had a slight twinkle in them from her remarkably advanced sense of dry humor, but she rarely talked unless I asked her a direct question, and sometimes even then. Neither of us asked about the others past…not that I was positive that she could even remember it, anyway.

I decided to let her sleep a little longer more—she could never get enough sleep with all the running that we did—and eventually I shook her awake. Silently, she jumped down the tree with me, and we landed together simultaneously on our feet, though her inexperienced legs didn't hold up as well as mine, and instead of landing lightly on her toes, she landed awkwardly and wobbled a bit before catching herself. Mutely, we grabbed up the two torn and dirty backpacks that I had packed up earlier, and we began to stretch. I'd been on track before the accident, and I knew that neither of us could afford to have a torn or even strained muscle—I'd felt it before.

I was just pulling my foot up to my rear when Alyssa sighed something under her breath, but I ignored her. She talked to herself, too.

"Ready?" I asked as she finished up.

She nodded, and then I rocked forward on my toes and took off at a steady jog that gradually turned into a rolling, comfortable run. At only ten years old, Alyssa could somehow keep up with me at this pace, but when I really hit the gas, everyone including her was left far behind.


End file.
